Who Reads?

The July 9/16, 2010 issue of Entertainment Weekly carries a column by Stephen King called My Must Summer Reads. 'Uncle Stevie', as he refers to himself at times, does a great job of finding good reads, but what caught my attention were some 'bummer' statistics he shared.

"According to ParaPublishing.com (quoted on the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop page), a third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and 42 percent of college grads never read another book after college. The National Endowment for the Arts says that 57 percent of Americans read for pleasure at least occasionally, which is more hopeful, but it still leaves a lot of people watching four hours of tube a night."

Since the column he wrote doesn't appear on the EW site, the books he reviews are The Millennium Trilogy (Stieg Larsson); The Passage (Justin Cronin); The Unnamed (Josuha Ferris); The Strip (Thomas Perry); The Storm Prey (John Sandford; and, last but not least, his favorite Ordinary Thunderstorms (William Boyd).